"Being associated with employing people using dubious methods might damage their image.

So whilst we might inform you who they were you simply cannot publish it in your report and the information has now been classified, and we are organising a leak inquiry..."

A simply splendid tale about a Parliamentary Select Committee and the Serious Organised Crimes Agency not quite seeing eye to eye from the Indy...

New hacking cover-up: Police refuse to name and shame 'blue-chip' firms that used corrupt investigators

The Serious Organised Crime Agency has refused to disclose the names of blue-chip companies who commissioned corrupt private investigators who broke the law because revealing them would damage the firms’ commercial interests, The Independent has learnt.

Sir Ian Andrews, the agency’s chairman, told Parliament that publishing the information could “substantially undermine the financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality”.

In an extraordinary letter to MPs, the former senior Ministry of Defence official said the evidence held for years by Soca, which was revealed last month by this newspaper, has now been “formally classified” because the information may breach the human rights of the law firms, insurance companies and wealthy individuals who hired corrupt private investigators".

And the justification seems to be that it would be unfair to release the names of the firms etc. who employed these investigators to discover things for them because they simply may have not realised what sort of methods the investigators would use to obtain the information the firms had hired them to uncover.

A viewpoint that one unnamed individual doesn't entirely go along with...

A senior source at the Information Commissioner’s office said: “It is market forces. If you don’t cut out the demand, it won’t stop. The City drives the corporate spooks but the big boys always escape. We should be saying to the clients that if you buy this information, the financial and reputational damage will be so great, it wouldn’t be worth doing it.”

Late Night Update : The Indy has now published a second piece, a l-o-n-g piece, entitled Revealed: New blue-chip dirty tricks scandal after 12 years of silence and intrusion

 

EXCLUSIVE Report shows industrial-scale ‘blagging’ on behalf of insurance, financial services and legal companies as bogus calls made by investigators seeking information about members of the public

• Revealed: The secret manual of dirty tricks